NAME

SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION

GNU sem is an alias for GNU parallel --semaphore.

It works as a tool for executing shell commands in parallel. GNU sem acts as a counting semaphore. When GNU sem is called with command it will start the command in the background. When num number of commands are running in the background, GNU sem will wait for one of these to complete before starting another command.

Before looking at the options you may want to check out the examples after the list of options. That will give you an idea of what GNU sem is capable of.

OPTIONS

command

Command to execute. The command may be followed by arguments for the command.

--bg

Run command in background thus GNU parallel will not wait for completion of the command before exiting. This is the default.

See also: --fg

-jN

Run up to N commands in parallel. Default is 1 thus acting like a mutex.

--jobsN

-jN

--max-procsN

-PN

Run up to N commands in parallel. Default is 1 thus acting like a mutex.

--jobs+N

-j+N

--max-procs+N

-P+N

Add N to the number of CPU cores. Run up to this many jobs in parallel. For compute intensive jobs -j +0 is useful as it will run number-of-cpu-cores jobs simultaneously.

--jobs-N

-j-N

--max-procs-N

-P-N

Subtract N from the number of CPU cores. Run up to this many jobs in parallel. If the evaluated number is less than 1 then 1 will be used. See also --use-cpus-instead-of-cores.

--jobsN%

-jN%

--max-procsN%

-PN%

Multiply N% with the number of CPU cores. Run up to this many jobs in parallel. If the evaluated number is less than 1 then 1 will be used. See also --use-cpus-instead-of-cores.

--jobsprocfile

-jprocfile

--max-procsprocfile

-Pprocfile

Read parameter from file. Use the content of procfile as parameter for -j. E.g. procfile could contain the string 100% or +2 or 10.

--semaphorenamename

--idname

Use name as the name of the semaphore. Default is the name of the controlling tty (output from tty).

The default normally works as expected when used interactively, but when used in a script name should be set. $$ or my_task_name are often a good value.

The semaphore is stored in ~/.parallel/semaphores/

--fg

Do not put command in background.

--semaphoretimeoutsecs (alpha testing)

--stsecs (alpha testing)

If secs > 0: If the semaphore is not released within secs seconds, take it anyway.

If secs < 0: If the semaphore is not released within secs seconds, exit.

--wait

-w

Wait for all commands to complete.

EXAMPLE: Gzipping *.log

Run one gzip process per CPU core. Block until a CPU core becomes available.

EXAMPLE: Protecting pod2html from itself

pod2html creates two files: pod2htmd.tmp and pod2htmi.tmp which it does not clean up. It uses these two files for a short time. But if you run multiple pod2html in parallel (e.g. in a Makefile with make -j) you need to protect pod2html from running twice at the same time. sem running as a mutex will do just that:

BUGS

REPORTING BUGS

AUTHOR

LICENSE

Copyright (C) 2010,2011,2012,2013 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or at your option any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

Documentation license I

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